[[Home|🏠]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> [[Interviews]] <span style="color: LightSlateGray">></span> October 16 2022 **Insider**: [[Peter Beck]] **Source**: [NASASpaceflight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb7_dDOcb78) **Date**: October 16 2022  🔗 Backup Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb7_dDOcb78 ## 🎙️ Transcript >[!hint] Transcript may contain errors or inaccuracies. **Host:** All right folks, you know the drill. Super light staff here running NSF Live, but we have our special guest Peter Beck today. Me and Thomas here as well. Let me know if you can hear me too. Give me some five by fives in chat and if everything's working correctly. Little bars jumping so I assume that it's working correctly. I got five by fives in chat. Thank you for the help there, so let's go ahead and get started with another exciting episode of NSF Live. Like I already—I mean, he was on the thumbnail, so you knew who the special guest was going to be—but please give a big warm NSF welcome to Mr. Peter Beck of Rocket Lab. Peter, how are you doing today? **Peter Beck:** I'm doing really well, thanks guys. **Host:** Outstanding. This is not your first time on the show here, right? You've been on our show before, I believe. **Peter Beck:** Yeah, I think we had a chat about a year ago. We were looking at you running battering rams into pieces of stainless steel or something like that. **Host:** All right. And then also on the show today we will have Mr. Thomas Burghardt, News Director for NSF. Thomas, how you doing? **Thomas Burghardt:** I'm doing well, glad to talk to Peter again. We've got a lot of exciting new Rocket Lab news to talk about, so it should be good. **Host:** All right, well we are going to get this show started right away. We've got 90 minutes here, folks. Quick housekeeping: you know this is a live show unless you're watching a video after the fact, but don't get confused by that. If you've got questions for us, tag us in chat. Just put @NASASpaceflight or just be like "hey I have a question." If you get us tagged @NASASpaceflight, it goes into some cool software we have here. We will choose questions over the course of the show to ask Peter here. We will try to make the questions topical and of course appropriate. So if we don't ask your question, well, you know, maybe we just didn't get to it. But please ask questions that are relevant to what we're talking about at the time. Don't completely try to change the topic. And also, if you're doing things like super chats or gifted memberships or anything like that, we totally appreciate those, but on special event shows where we've got a special guest, we try to give all the time to the special guest. So along those lines, I'll stop talking here and let's go ahead and get going with the show. Thomas, Peter, where are we gonna start today? ## Recent Electron Missions and Launch Cadence **Thomas:** Well, I think we should start with Rocket Lab's most recent launch. They launched ITAR Goes Up from here, a successful Electron mission from New Zealand. Rocket Lab is just starting to hit a bit of a stride here. Peter, I'm just asking how is your normal Electron operations going so far? Are you implementing any lessons learned, or are there just kind of evolutions as the launch system matures that has allowed you to increase the launch cadence a bit here recently? **Peter Beck:** The number one thing that really drives our launch cadence is our customer readiness. So we've changed the way we do things a little bit with respect to scheduling. We've built another clean room so we can process multiple customers at one time, and that's really probably been one of the biggest enablers for this monthly cadence this year—actually making sure that our customers are on time, we get them integrated on time, and we can push a launch vehicle out to the pad on time. ## Wallops Launch Site and Upcoming Missions **Thomas:** And speaking of launch pads, I think one of the biggest topics that we're definitely going to want to dive into today—now that you've got two operational pads down in New Zealand—is the third launch pad that's now coming up in Wallops, Virginia. It sounds like that first launch is coming up as early as December, so what kind of forward work is Rocket Lab doing to get ready for that December launch date for this Hawkeye mission you've got coming up? **Peter Beck:** That pad's been ready for basically two years. I think we red-dressed on that pad about two years ago. So it's all been waiting on the NASA AFTS [Autonomous Flight Termination System] software certification. We run that AFTS system and have done for nearly two years now out of our New Zealand pad, but it requires NASA to sign off their own piece of software. That's been the only thing that's really been governing the launch timing there. The team at NASA's been working super hard, and I've been monitoring progress there obviously very, very closely and throwing every bit of resource that we could at it. It looks like it's all going to come together. It's going to be tight, but it's all going to come together and we're going to finally get that launch out of LC2. And then you'll probably see a few more pretty closely up the back of that, which will be good. **Thomas:** I think we actually have an investor day slide—I've been referencing the investor day materials a lot because that's a lot of the recent news that we definitely want to talk about. Another mission coming up in January for a confidential commercial customer, so I won't inquire on who that is, but another mission coming right off the back. So basically once that first mission happens, you'll expect a pretty rapid cadence quickly? **Peter Beck:** We will, yeah. There's a lot of pent-up demand to fly out of that site. So we'll try and let some pressure out of the balloon on that one and get a few away early. Then it'll be pretty cool—we can just chop between Southern and Northern Hemisphere launches and range requirements as they rise and fall. **Host:** Well, really quickly, for people who may not know exactly what we're talking about, we're talking about LC2. The cool thing about LC2 is that it is not on the super-secret lair island that you've seen down at New Zealand—the one of the most, if not the most, picturesque launch site in the world honestly. This actually has a very familiar water tower next to it because this is on Wallops Island over in Virginia here in the United States. So when we say Rocket Lab's LC2, we're talking about these first launches where they will be launching not from New Zealand but here from the States. I think we had a little bit of a map sort of presentation thing. We don't do presentations, but [showing map] I'm not kidding, here's my house—I live in Charlotte. I say "here in the United States" because we can just go up to Virginia, Chincoteague Island, and this is where the Wallops Island launch facility is. The Antares rockets fly out of there. You've seen a couple of our videos from there, but Rocket Lab actually has built that new infrastructure and is continuing to build infrastructure there, right Peter? **Peter Beck:** So actually, LC2 is not just a pad. We built a whole ICF building as well in the Innovation Park that can process two Electrons at once, with multiple clean rooms and control room. And then of course you've got the whole Neutron setup. I'm not sure how recent this Google Maps is—not very actually. You're not going to see all the concrete and stuff that's laid down there for Neutron, but we've got quite a bit going on in that region for sure. ## LC2 vs. Mahia Launch Sites **Thomas:** You mentioned the LC2 launch cadence that's going to come up pretty quickly. How is that going to compare to your Mahia launches? Do you expect that to be some sort of 50/50 split, or how are they going to compare to one another? You mentioned a lot of demand for the Wallops pad. **Peter Beck:** It'll move around a little bit. It would be great if it was as predictable as 50/50, but it rises and falls depending on what missions and what customer. The LC2 pad was primarily built for rapid-on-demand launch for our defense customers, so that was its primary purpose. The whole pad is geared around how you get a rocket from the ICF and out to the pad and launched within 24 hours. Although, ironically, the first customers that are flying out of there are in fact commercial. But it'll move around between Mahia and LC2. Quite frankly, the launch I want to do though is Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere simultaneously. I reckon that would be one to do. **Host:** It balances out so you don't affect the orbit of the Earth by launching. **Peter Beck:** [Laughs] **Thomas:** I was about to ask, would you do any sort of 24-hour integration rollout launch demonstration? Would there be a reason to demonstrate simultaneously launches from two different hemispheres? **Peter Beck:** I'm sure if we think hard enough, we'll figure out a reason why that has to be done. **Host:** "Just because you can" - demonstrate capabilities. **Peter Beck:** Yeah, that's right. ## Mission Control Operations **Host:** That's actually a great question that I saw in chat over here. Do you still control everything from your primary launch site, like your mission control is still in one place? Or you can have two separate geographically diverse mission controls? How's that going to work with the Wallops pads? **Peter Beck:** We have a mission control here in New Zealand, we have a mission control in our headquarters in Long Beach, we have range control down in the Mahia launch site, and we have range control at LC2 in the ICF in a Rocket Lab controlled building. So when we launch out of LC2, we'll probably use Mission Control at headquarters in Long Beach, and we'll use range control with LC2. But actually, there's no reason why we couldn't use Mission Control in New Zealand. Obviously, you need to use range control on-site, but when we did the Capstone mission for example, we ran one shift here in New Zealand and then another shift in the American Mission Control Center at headquarters. So they're all pretty seamlessly linked. ## Differences Between Launch Sites **Host:** That actually leads right into another great question about the new pads. What's the biggest difference between launching at the Virginia locations versus the New Zealand locations? Is there a difference in transporting rockets, or is there extra paperwork because one is at a NASA or Mars site or whatever? **Peter Beck:** The pads are the same. We built three of these launch erectors and whatnot, so it's all the same. The big difference is, I think you hit the nail on the head, when we launch out of New Zealand, it's a private orbital launch pad. We launch under an FAA launch license and that's it. When we launch out of a federal facility, obviously there's a NASA contingent that goes along with that. So we have essentially an FAA launch license and a NASA launch license, hence the reasons why we can't just launch out of LC2 without the NASA sign off on the AFTS. There's kind of like two governing bodies that you have to work with. ## Autonomous Flight Termination System (AFTS) **Host:** Gotcha. On that AFTS, I think in a previous conversation you actually mentioned that part of getting it NASA certified and everything like that was also being able to sell that as a package to other launch providers, as a sort of self-enclosed AFTS system. Is that still a plan for Rocket Lab? **Peter Beck:** Look, I think everybody knows that our first flight was terminated from a ground-based AFTS system that lost track. So we're very passionate about flight termination systems, having experienced that. After that, we bowed and declared "never again." We've had a long partnership with both DARPA and NASA developing this autonomous flight termination system, making sure that it's available for everybody. Part of the reason why it's taken NASA so long has been making sure that the system doesn't just work on Electron—it can work on other launch vehicles, it can work on SLS if it needed to. So we've certainly taken one for the team on AFTS development industry-wide, and I think all said and done, it's going to be great for the industry, but it's certainly been pretty painful for us. We've not been able to launch out of LC2 until that work has been completed, but I think at the end of it, it'll be a great flight termination system for everybody to use. **Host:** You said SLS there. How long do the batteries last in your flight termination system? **Peter Beck:** [Laughs] Sorry! ## Electron Reusability **Thomas:** Other Electron questions that I've got involve reusability, and we can certainly try to tie that in with Wallops here. But for starters, the first catch attempt that happened down in New Zealand—the "catch and release" if you will—how's everyone looking for another catch attempt in the near future? **Peter Beck:** You shouldn't have to wait long for that. The team's hard at work at the moment. The catch element—we have that fairly well defined, we're pretty happy with that. What the team's been working on is an ability to basically catch the rocket and then fly it all the way back to either the launch site or an offloading dock. You can't have a parachute flapping in the wind as you're flying along at 100 knots, so there are additional systems that we've been working on that constrain the parachute after capture so that you can fly with a rocket under the helicopter with a streamed parachute at a good velocity to be able to fly either back to the launch pad or to another landing zone. That's where the majority of the work has occurred. We're super happy with re-entry now, super happy with guidance, and although we released the last one, we've done lots of testing since then and we're super happy with the catch. So you shouldn't have to wait long—we'll announce something here shortly and go do it again. The silver rockets are running down the production line now as a standard product, and we're pretty much just making this operational at this point. But what I will say is, we've learned so much through this whole process. Neutron's design is the way it is because of these learnings, and I think if we hadn't done the Electron reusability program, we would have made a whole bunch of mistakes with Neutron that we wouldn't have found out until we started flying stuff. **Thomas:** I was almost assuming leading into that question, because providers that have gone into reusable rockets have definitely implemented lessons learned and done block upgrades. I could only assume the same applies to Neutron. You mentioned silver rockets rolling down the production line—we've even seen Electrons that could have been reused but were just launching as expendable because that's just what the production line produces now. **Peter Beck:** Whether a vehicle is reusable or not is dependent on a few things. One is the trajectory and the performance margins in the vehicle. We lose about 10-15% of the performance of the vehicle with reusability, so it depends on how much margin you have. The final factor is the customer. The silver rocket you saw launch was for the NRO—really important payloads, really important customer—and that wasn't one that we wanted to experiment on in any way. So we can fly them in expendable mode or reusable mode, but at the moment, I'm not sure if it's every fourth rocket or so—don't quote me on that—but periodically every rocket is just a reusable vehicle. We either put it to one side for a reusable mission, or reuse it (that's the best case), or if we have to, just fly it. The cost of a reusable vehicle versus a standard vehicle is almost negligible. **Host:** Does it cost the same in terms of what you would charge a customer who's flying something? Do they make the decision on reusability or not, or do you make the decision? Is there a price difference? **Peter Beck:** At this stage of the program, it's definitely a lot of customer discussions because we're not catching these frequently and reusing and putting them back. So where the program is at the moment, we would never enforce a reused vehicle on a customer. The ironic thing is that the reusable vehicles will probably have more attention to detail on them, especially the early ones, than probably even a flight vehicle because we'll be looking at absolutely everything with a fine-tooth comb in excruciating detail. So they probably have more mission assurance on a reused vehicle than perhaps even on an expendable. But until we really get in that groove—and as you've seen with SpaceX, it takes a while to get into that groove and really understand all the service lives of every component and making sure that all the environments are as you expected. ## Reusability Mission Percentage **Thomas:** As the system moves towards operational maturity, how many of your missions—both in New Zealand and once you can move those operations up to Wallops as well—what portion of your Electron manifest would you expect to be able to be supported with reusable vehicles? **Peter Beck:** For Electron, I think it's probably 50/50, because you still need some performance on the vehicle for some missions. Also, in downrange winter at night in a thunderstorm, we're not going to fly a helicopter and try and catch a rocket—we're just not. So those missions will be unlikely to be reusable. And one of the things that people come to fly with us on is schedule certainty, and that also means like T-0. When we commit to a T-0, if you look at most of our launches, they're instantaneous T-zeros for our customers. So we're not going to mess around with that—that's the priority. **Host:** Something that a lot of people don't understand is if you're trying to recover or reuse or land your rocket, you have two areas where weather is important. It's not just at the launch pad—it's also where you're going to try to recover it. That can actually make it maybe a beautiful day at the launch pad, while downrange where the helicopter is trying to fly it's not so great, and that can affect your ability to launch, right? **Peter Beck:** 100%. ## Component Recovery and Reuse **Host:** And so you've brought back a couple of boosters that either were caught and released, or didn't even have a catch attempt, and you've gotten data from those. What has that data looked like, and have you been able to test fire or perhaps even reuse components from those vehicles even though they weren't brought back dry? **Peter Beck:** Totally. We've reentered five vehicles, and I think three of them we've put back in the factory. Of those vehicles, we've stripped components off like whole press systems, and we've reflown and hot-fired engines. So I'm not worried about that—we're looking super good there. The re-entry environment, we've got it smoother and smoother every time, and it's looking super good. Very, very happy with that. **Host:** Would you expect there to be any operational reusability from vehicles that can't be caught and can only be recovered after a splashdown, or are you going to limit that to vehicles that can be caught and brought back dry? **Peter Beck:** There are just so many unknown things when you take it for a dunk. Look, we've proven that you can pull stuff out, but the vehicle was never designed to be dunked in salt water. We've pulled components off like whole press systems, vent relief valves, press valves, and all that sort of stuff, cleaned them, inspected them, and reused them. So certainly we could do that, but the strong desire here is to just keep it dry, keep it away from the sea. But absolutely, if we dunked a few, there's a heap of components that are good, and we've already proven that we can take an engine—even though it's been dunked—with a relatively light amount of resurfacing, hot fire again. The engines are made out of Inconel anyway, so corrosion is not really too much of an issue there. So it's a totally doable thing. ## Reusability Lessons for Neutron **Thomas:** You mentioned lessons learned being applied to Neutron. Anything specific that has been really eye-opening regarding engines, thermal protection systems, guidance for re-entry and recovery that's going to be applied towards the medium-lift vehicle? **Peter Beck:** Re-entry is actually a thermal problem. Everything kind of bears down to the fact that it's a thermal problem, and the best way to deal with a thermal problem is to not have a thermal problem. If you look at Neutron, it's got a really wide base, so it's literally like a shuttle—super wide base, super low mass. You put the ballistic coefficient where you need it, and because you have a very low mass, you have very low inertias and energies, so the actual heating of the vehicle is relatively light. Electron is the same—it's got a really high mass fraction, especially on stage one, so it's very light. It decelerates really quickly and we don't actually generate too much thermal energy on the base. Also, if you can control the re-entry corridor really accurately, then only the base really sees the temperature and you can control that heat flux around the vehicle. If you look at Neutron, it's got a continually descending diameter as it starts at the base and up to the top. That's basically so that you have a continually changing pressure gradient over the length of the vehicle, which ensures you have no shock waves attaching to the outer skins of the vehicle. What that means is that you don't need to get carried away with thermal protection systems outside of the vehicle. If you look at Electron, it's a 100% carbon composite vehicle. There's robust TPS on the base where it needs to be anyway for ascent because you have plume interactions and recirculation flow at the base. But up the side of Electron, you'll see that we have this airgel high-emissivity coating, which is really belts and braces. It's only about 0.1 of a millimeter thick, so it's super thin, and that just helps with some of the radiant heat flux that you see on re-entry. All of these things feed into Neutron's design and development, and the material selection. Electron is an incredibly light vehicle, and Neutron will be an incredibly light vehicle. Those things really help you when you've got a large ballistic coefficient and super light vehicle—it's the perfect kind of re-entry. **Host:** So it's got a large amount of drag and a low amount of mass, so it slows down really quickly. It's like trying to throw a feather versus a ball bearing or a golf ball or something like that, right? If you've got a lot of mass and not a lot of drag, it's gonna not want to slow down. If you've got a lot of drag and not a lot of mass—I mean, how far can you throw a feather, really? **Peter Beck:** Yeah, think of it like a shuttle. You give that thing a good whack, it's frustratingly slow, and it slows down pretty quick. ## National Security Payloads **Host:** We've got a couple questions here that are relevant to Electron. When you launch what would be for us a classified payload, like a national security payload or something like that, do you actually know what it is, or is it just like a black box that says "do not open" and you just put it on the rocket and ship it? **Peter Beck:** There's a really robust payload permitting process, especially when launched out of New Zealand. There's basically two balances and checks. One, it goes through all the appropriate interagency reviews to get an FAA launch license in the US, and there's a secondary process if it launches out of New Zealand from the New Zealand government. So there's lots of checks and balances to ensure that the right people know what the payload is and its purpose. ## Intercontinental Flights **Host:** Could you fly between your two launch pads? Could you launch at Wallops and land in New Zealand, or is there anything that would keep you from trying that, maybe with Neutron? **Peter Beck:** With Neutron, the first stage—even on a pretty healthy ballistic arc, you're not going to get halfway around the world. Certainly the second stage, if you re-enter that somehow (not that that's designed to re-enter), then I guess that would be possible. But it's kind of pointless landing a second stage on another continent, I think. Most of the time, the first stage is not designed to fly halfway around the world. It does a boost-back sort of thing—it lands on a platform or island or something that floats in the water. But it's not 10,000 miles away, it's 800 miles downrange or something like that. If you look at the trajectory optimization you need to do to get to orbit efficiently, the boost is really to get you through the soup. So you're up and out of the soup, then start your pitch over, but the majority of the rotational velocity is achieved by the second stage. ## Wallops Launch Cadence **Host:** How many launches do you have coming up on the manifest from Wallops? If I'm a US-based launch fan over here on the East Coast, am I going to see it flying once a month next year, or what are you looking at? **Peter Beck:** It'll start up pretty busy down there. There's the two that we've announced, and I'll get in trouble if I start announcing other launches without everybody's approval. But yeah, it'll get off to a busy start at the beginning of next year. It's an asset that we love and we want to use it as much as we can, so we'll flip between the two sites as appropriate. **Host:** What is the turnaround time for the pad at Wallops, assuming you just had a list of customers bringing payloads in on trucks as fast as possible? What would be your limiting factor—how quickly could you actually launch out of that pad? **Peter Beck:** The limiting factor would be a couple of things. One is the team size—at the moment it's sort of set up for a one-a-month cadence. If we wanted to do more than that, we'd need to swell the team size a little bit. As I mentioned, the ICF is capable of processing two Electrons simultaneously, so that gives us a lot of scope to grow there if we need to increase our cadence. **Thomas:** The first mission for Wallops is going to be this mission for Hawkeye 360, a prominent commercial smallsat company, and this first flight is the first of three that you already have on contract with that company. When would we expect those missions to be taking place from Wallops, or is that a multi-launch site thing? **Peter Beck:** The true answer to that is: it depends on trajectory. Obviously, we get a much more efficient sun-synchronous corridor out of Mahia. Depending on the inclination that customer may desire will determine that a little bit. There is a super nice sun-synchronous corridor out of Wallops with a dog leg—way less energy intensive than out of the Cape. But nevertheless, it is still a dog leg, and on a small launch vehicle we very rarely have the performance margin to do dog legs. So it really depends on trajectories and the customers' desire for which launch site they want to launch from. It might not surprise you that a lot of customers actually prefer to launch down in Mahia. There's always a large contingent of people who turn up to watch the launch, and there's the jet boats and bungee jumping and all sorts of things. **Host:** The customer support team is critical there to observe the launches! **Peter Beck:** [Laughs] **Host:** That's probably my best chance to get down there, to actually see a launch. I'll have to convince the wife that we should just go to New Zealand. **Host:** So those launch corridors from Wallops—you have a dog leg that gets you to sun-synchronous south, going southbound I would assume? So you have everything from that up until some mid-inclination going northeast from Wallops? I know they can do ISS inclination. **Peter Beck:** Yep. There's a few cutouts for obvious reasons in some of the trajectories, but that's why we love Wallops. I think it's a somewhat undiscovered jewel that you can actually get a lot of trajectories out of there, and it's not too busy, which is great. **Host:** Is that like a southern dog leg when you're talking about the dog leg out of Wallops? For people watching who don't know what a dog leg is, it's when the rocket sort of turns mid-trajectory. On the map, a dog leg would go like this and then turn like that. Is it a southern dog leg? **Peter Beck:** I believe it is, yep. **Host:** So for people that don't know what we're talking about when we say a dog leg, we just mean a rocket that starts on one trajectory and then turns in a direction. You see it sometimes to avoid islands—some of the launches that go out of India do dog legs to avoid different parts of land. Going out of the Cape, it's the same sort of thing—if they want to get on a more southern trajectory, they'll go out away from the coast and then turn a little bit to get into the trajectory they want. ## Neutron Development **Thomas:** Let's talk about the Neutron section of our show—the new rocket coming down the pipe, which will of course be launching from Wallops. How are preparations coming along for the actual Wallops facilities that will support the new rocket? **Peter Beck:** In the investor day presentation, I used a chicken or turkey analogy. What I'm trying to say is there's a whole heap of work that goes into something, and you see very little gain for the amount of effort. Then all of a sudden, it's kind of like home renovating—if you start with a room, you strip all the wallpaper off and it looks terrible. You work and work and make it all smooth, but it's not until you put the final coat of paint on that you actually see the fruit of all your labor. Making a rocket is similar to that. We've been digging holes in the ground and pouring concrete—a whole lot of really big infrastructural pieces that are super long lead and are really the foundations of the whole program. One of those is obviously the LC2 launch site, having poured concrete and built buildings out there, whole production facilities. It's great to see some of that come to fruition because those can be a year or more in the making, especially in today's environment. The thing that's blown me away is just supply chain issues. People ask "how is supply chain?" Because we're so vertically integrated, building rockets and satellites, we've been able to manage supply chain really effectively. There's been no launch delayed or satellite or anything like that. But we don't own concrete plants or steel plants, so as we're developing this infrastructure for Neutron, that's been really tough. We just want concrete and steel, and the lead time for that stuff has just completely blown out. **Host:** A lot of people don't think about that. If you want to design a new rocket, at some point you're going to need concrete and pad and all the infrastructure—the stage zero we call it sometimes—the places where you prepare, integrate, and put it together. You have to have launch pads. You don't just roll a rocket out to the beach and launch it. **Peter Beck:** What you're seeing there, prior to that there was a chicken farm there. I wanted to call this facility "KFC" (Key Fabrication Center), but I got overruled on that one. So I think it's called something slightly more boring. But there was a lot of work that had to be done right from the beginning. **Host:** I think in one of these other shots, there's still some sort of farm in the background. That is something all around Wallops—they have chicken farms, these long low buildings. Sometimes when you're going through security over there, you smell them on the way in. **Peter Beck:** The beautiful thing about this site is, what you don't see in that image—on the slight right, that road on the right there is the main entry to the base. The main gate is right there. So rolling it out of the factory, just down the road onto the pad is pretty awesome. **Host:** So this is just outside of the Wallops fence line, and you just go right through the main gate there, and then the launch pads are up this road? Is that one of the water towers in the background? **Peter Beck:** It is, yep. ## Neutron Launch and Landing Sites **Host:** Let's launch facilities down at Wallops. We were talking about where the pads are going to be. So we've got we'll have a launch pad and we'll have a landing pad, because of course Neutron will be a propulsively landed vehicle. Want to give us the lay of the land here for the new complex in addition to LC2? **Peter Beck:** [Discussing locations on map] So that's the Electron pad, and if you go down the coast a little bit, right around there is the landing pad. **Host:** So it's like outbound and then inbound? **Peter Beck:** Correct. **Host:** Expecting one launch pad and one landing pad for Wallops? Are you gonna pull an LC1A/1B on us? **Peter Beck:** One at the moment. We've learned a lot about pad infrastructure. If you look at the Neutron pad, there's no strongback or erector. The vehicle is designed to spend its life vertical, so breaking over a big rocket is a little bit of a pain—there's lots of infrastructure that goes with that. If you look at a Neutron pad, it's just super clean. Once again, lots of lessons learned from operating a launch vehicle. Pad infrastructure is called stage zero for a good reason—there's a lot of stuff that goes on there. The more you can remove and simplify it, the better. **Host:** I will say, I love watching launches from Wallops because there is some fantastic publicly available viewing. It's actually a pad you can get the closest to without buying a ticket or anything like that. The ferry landing is a public viewing area, and when we're talking about pad 0A where they're going to have the Electron launches and the Neutron launches from, and then the landing zone down the road a little bit—if you're at the ferry dock, you have a great shot of both of those places. If you're interested in seeing launches, make sure that you follow Rocket Lab and keep up with what we're doing here. Follow them on Twitter @RocketLab. You know how to find NASASpaceflight because we'll be streaming it of course. But if you're anywhere in this area, you should be able to get a great view because you don't have to buy tickets like you do down at KSC. You can just go there and see an amazing launch, and I can't wait until Rocket Lab is flying from there. It's such a good place to watch launches from—the sun's coming up in the background, little birds chirping, water lapping at the dock. Make sure you keep up with what's going on for when those launches are going to happen because if you're within striking distance, it's really a fantastic place to go and watch a launch, especially if you've never seen a launch before. **Thomas:** I think based on Rocket Lab's cadence too, there'll be more frequent launches from Wallops than there have been recently, other than the sounding rockets from there every once in a while. Antares only flies like twice a year, so between Electron and Neutron, I think that'll be more frequent than Wallops is used to perhaps. **Host:** Book your hotels early—there's not a lot of hotels. ## Neutron Launch and Recovery Infrastructure **Thomas:** I think there's also a rendering from the investor day presentation that actually shows what some of the launch and landing infrastructure is going to look like, and I think there's something else in that image that I need to ask Peter about. On a previous episode of Spacecraft Live, we were talking about Electron reusability which involves marine assets and boats for recovery, and you were not totally a fan of those because they're frustrating. **Peter Beck:** Look, firstly this is a rendering of a fully developed state, so you can see all the elements there. Neutron can do 8 tons to orbit with return to launch site. It does 13 tons to orbit with downrange landing, and obviously to do a downrange landing, you have to have a marine asset. So that's what we have depicted in that artist rendition there—a downrange asset for those 13-ton launches, if required. **Host:** So it's not like we were speculating when we first saw this image, like "is that actually a barge or something?" Is that just a pier, like you should put a ferris wheel on it or something? But this is actually going to float off into the distance, get a rocket landed on it, and then return over here and it sort of docks here? What's going on with the train tracks? **Peter Beck:** If you look at the building on the far right, the rollover—that rolls over and basically picks the vehicle from the barge and then pulls it back onto the launch site. The entire building rolls out on those tracks, and it's got cranes and infrastructure. **Host:** That's cool, that makes a lot of sense. I had never even made that connection, but now I totally see it. **Host:** So we thought it might be like a transporter or something—the transporter goes back on the rails—but it's the whole building. The building is like a crane/train car sort of system, and it goes over there, gets it off the barge. **Host:** Do you have a name for it yet? Like "marine asset" or "those dirty, dirty marine assets"? What do you want to call it? **Peter Beck:** [Laughs] Dirty marine asset. **Thomas:** So how far along is this kind of concept? Is this "yes, we want to have a downrange recovery asset, we want to have the return to launch site profile, you'll also be able to offer it expendably for a couple extra tons to orbit"? Is this mobile service tower looking thing and all this stuff mostly set in stone, or are you still kind of working out details as to what those assets are really going to look like? **Peter Beck:** The concepts are set in stone. The details of the assets are—for example, the priority is to get to the pad in 24 hours and get one away. So we're unlikely to have the rollover building as you see it in that state. We'll do what we did exactly with Electron where we bring the product to market and then we'll continue to iterate on the infrastructure around it. Because if you just said "I'm not going to launch until I have all of my building and all of my factory and all of everything," then you can add more years to the delivery time. What our customers care about is how quickly we can get the vehicle into operations and start flying. The launch cadence will be relatively modest to begin with anyway. We'll follow basically the same path as we did with Electron—sort of three the first year, then six the second year, and so on. This isn't our first rodeo; we've played this game before. It's just completely absurd to say you're going to go out and do 12 launches in one year with a new vehicle. It's a very learned and iterated process to slowly build upon what you've got, to build the infrastructure as you go rather than wait until all the infrastructure is finished before you go and do anything. So this is what it would look like in its fully developed form. Our desire will always be to return to launch site, and we think we can do that much more inexpensively than landing downrange on a barge. From a customer's perspective, what they care about is reliability, performance of the vehicle, and the price. Although we have this marine asset, it's kind of yet to be determined how cost-effective that will actually be. Once we get a little bit further down the track, it may be more cost-effective to just fly more often with lighter payloads than to flow that extra mass and try and amortize all the cost of that marine asset. **Host:** I've got to ask, looking at this rendering, does it launch from here? Is this the launch pad? I'm not seeing a lot of flame diverters and stuff like that. It's just on a sort of a pedestal? **Peter Beck:** Yep, yep, that's the plan. There is a little bit more going on there than is just in the render. There is a flame trench there, but it's not hugely deep. **Host:** Is there like test stands around here? There's a little thing—is this just decoration or is this like an engine test stand? What do you got going on there? **Peter Beck:** That's an existing piece of infrastructure that belongs to the old Minotaur pad, I believe. **Host:** When we were drawing on the map, the landing site is actually a little bit further down the road in reality than we see on this render, right? **Peter Beck:** Don't read too much into an artist's impression. **Host:** You've got to fit it all in the same picture! **Peter Beck:** We know we love to pick it apart like "Oh, what's this? Is this marine radar?" **Host:** We tend to overdo it sometimes, but thank you for providing stuff like this because we love to think about it. **Peter Beck:** It's just a nice way of showing all of the separate elements and what they could be. ## Neutron Recovery Options and Design Philosophy **Thomas:** You mentioned the balance between return to launch site and downrange. When Neutron was first announced, you were saying this vehicle is really sized towards constellations—launching batches of satellites rather than a single larger, heavier payload. That means you can balance the cost of a downrange recovery versus a return to launch site recovery by simply changing the number of spacecraft on any particular flight. Is that the primary driver between the different recovery options versus expendable as well? What you'll be able to offer eventually when Neutron's operational? **Peter Beck:** Totally. At the end of the day, the things customers care about are reliability, schedule certainty, and cost. All of those things are a finely tuned engineering and financial model for the customer. If a particular customer has a payload requirement where it pencils out that landing downrange on a marine asset is the most viable way to deliver their constellation, that's what we'll do. But obviously our desire is to return to launch site wherever possible, but we need the flexibility to make sure we can provide the best outcome. **Host:** Real quick, somebody in chat has suggested that you call your landing barge the DMA—the Downrange Marine Asset—because then it could also be the Dirty Marine Asset. **Peter Beck:** I like it! ## Neutron Design Changes **Thomas:** Let's talk technically about design changes to Neutron from that investors day update that we got. **Peter Beck:** Awesome. **Thomas:** Let's start with one of the biggest ones. You've updated the fairing; you've also updated the cycle of the engine—the Archimedes engine. Let's maybe start with the fairing. The fairing is now two pieces, not four. It's less of a Hungry Hippo, but what's happening technically? **Peter Beck:** Technically, it's actually more of a Hungry Hippo because it's closer to a Hungry Hippo than it ever was. This is just through the engineering requirement process. Less moving parts is always better. You have higher structural integrity with halves than quarters. It's fewer Labyrinth seals that you need to get right for the two halves as opposed to four. From an actuation point of view, it was easier as well. The downside is you've got heavier pieces to actuate, and there's pluses and minuses, but at the end of the engineering trade, we determined it was better to do it in two halves than in four petals. A lot of people comment about how small the pivots are and all those sorts of things, but it's important to remember that when this fairing is opened, we're at around 100 kilometers altitude. The dynamic pressure is super low, and we're in a nice coast. There are no huge moments, so the fairing environment is very benign. **Host:** Plus you're not building it in Kerbal Space Program. If you're building in Kerbal, I could picture this waggling all over the place, but in the real world where you're in very thin atmosphere up at 100 kilometers, you don't have a lot of aero load pushing on it. The rocket's not actively wobbling back and forth trying to maneuver or anything like that. It is just almost like a delicate flower opening up without a lot of forces acting on it. **Peter Beck:** One of the interesting things about the fundamental trajectory for Neutron is it's different to a normal staging where you do the first and second stage separation at around 60 kilometers altitude, where there's still a bit of dynamic pressure and you've got more work to do there. On an Electron and many other rockets, you ignite the second stage, burn for a while—maybe 30 seconds to a minute—and then sever the fairing because you've ascended to that 100 kilometer kind of low heat flux, low dynamic pressure environment. Neutron's trajectory is different—we actually hold on to the first stage a bit longer and burn it longer than you would in a traditional launch vehicle. So when we open the fairing, we're in that similar environment. Also, when we're exiting the upper stage, we don't have big tip-off issues from dynamic pressures that would cause collisions. So the fundamental trajectory is slightly different, and it puts more energy emphasis on the first stage. If you look at the vehicle, you notice that the second stage versus the first stage is almost quite dramatically small. The reason for that is when you've got an expendable upper stage, that's the bit that you're not recovering, so the least amount of material in there possible is better. And the least amount of work that upper stage needs to do is better as well. If you look at the upper stage, it looks quite surprisingly small compared to the first stage. But the first stage is the bit we're getting back—it's the workhorse. Fundamentally, we're trying to make the first stage do more work than the second stage for those reasons. **Host:** In talking about the forces that are going to act on the two-clamshell fairing design, how much are you going to have to separate the second stage away from those open fairings before you light the engine? Is it like a pneumatic pusher that pushes it away, then it goes for a second to get some clearance? You're not lighting the engine while it's inside the first stage of Neutron, right? **Peter Beck:** Nope, that would be a bad day. There are quite a few things going on there. Because you've put more energy into the first stage, you're continuing on your ballistic downrange trajectory. If you're doing a return to launch site, for example, every second that you wait, you've traveled that much further downrange, which requires that much more energy to get you back. The maneuvers happen in pretty quick succession—the stage separation, getting those fairing halves closed, and getting the first stage on its way. If you can optimize it, what you really want is to have a slight angle of attack on your first stage when you've got your second stage, so the second stage plume can actually help the first stage turn. You can use less energy in the turning and get that vehicle around as quickly as you can—getting those engines lit back up and trying to arrest some of that downrange horizontal velocity. **Host:** That's got to also help you protect the top of that first stage. The sooner you get the first stage pivoting, the sooner that second stage plume isn't pointing directly into your interstage, right? **Peter Beck:** Exactly. **Host:** This isn't some sci-fi movie where it's all just snap out, snap in. **Host:** That's a great point. We talked about the first stage having the fairings that open up, the second stage comes out. Do you have to completely close the fairings before you can light the second stage? Do they have to be structurally attached before the rocket begins to do its flip, and the second stage lights to help it flip over? **Peter Beck:** When the fairings are in the two halves, obviously in the radial direction, they're not very stiff. So the sooner they come back together as a cone, that's where all the structural integrity comes from. We'll look to exit that stage pretty quickly, get those fairings closed, and once that's occurred, the fairing has to have pretty decent TPS on the nose of it anyway for the ascent heating. So there's zero issue about any plume impingement on that. But really, you want to get the angle of attack between the second stage and the first stage at the right position to help it on its way. **Host:** How do you test that? In terms of engineering the fairing that has to open up and close, do you have like a weightless sort of jig and a vacuum, and you're going to have them snap open and snap closed on the ground as you're testing them? **Peter Beck:** This is one of the few systems where actually the Earth's environment is going to be worse than the space environment. So you can test that pretty satisfactorily down here on the ground and have a rich amount of confidence, because as you point out, you've got all kinds of other elements—a higher G load for one thing, and also the atmosphere. **Host:** Does that same concept—talking about the fairings getting their structural integrity back when they're fully closed—also apply to when you can have the first stage engines firing? Do you need to shut down your engines before you can pop the fairing open, and you need them closed again before you boost back? **Peter Beck:** Absolutely, yeah. **Host:** So we'll expect that to be a much quicker motion then. I definitely envisioned it in the slow-mo sci-fi way, but now I see why that works. **Peter Beck:** We're traveling eight times the speed of sound at that point, so every second that goes by, you cover a fair bit of distance. ## Capsule Development Potential **Thomas:** Before we move on from fairings, there was also this other thing that got announced regarding the top of the Neutron rocket when there maybe wouldn't be a fairing there. You claimed you weren't announcing anything in this slide—it was "not an announcement." **Peter Beck:** It's super clear right there—not a capsule. **Thomas:** So I guess what prompts—when you're developing a new rocket, is this something that you have to look into and say "okay, in theory, if a customer asked us to pursue this, what are the things you're keeping in mind when you develop your new launch vehicle to maybe enable some future capability," or at least the option to go that route if you wanted to? **Peter Beck:** It would be totally silly to develop a vehicle of this class and not make it man-ratable. I think one thing is absolutely inevitable—there's going to be more and more human spaceflight as time goes by. Today, there's really one customer, and that's NASA. So if you want to be purely analytical about it, there's not a great market right now. But I think my personal view is that that will change in the future. So it would be remiss of us to not be thinking about this now. This drives a whole bunch of things—it drives structural safety factors on the vehicle, it drives how you do valves, redundancy schemes and methodologies. Instead of having to go back and re-engineer a whole vehicle to make it man-ratable, it's much better to start off with that premise from day one. So we're not man-rating this vehicle, but we want to make sure that it is man-ratable with a minimum amount of effort. The last thing you want to do is go back and redo your tank structural testing because you're 0.2 out on a safety factor. We get a lot of questions like "how does the capsule work with the fairing?" So I thought the easy way to answer this question would just be to show a picture of what a capsule would look like. It's pretty obvious that the capsule just replaces where the fairing is. So that was really the point of this. We don't have an active program, but we're certainly thinking about it and making sure that the vehicle will be capable of it. This is a design that would work, and that's basically it. **Host:** I was trying to pick it apart—is it not a capsule announcement? Is it not not a capsule announcement? But one way or the other, it's something that you're thinking about while you're going through the other design parts of Neutron so that you don't have to come back to the drawing board. I think you're absolutely right—we're going to have more people in space, and it's not just going to be a few governmental organizations looking for rides up to their space station or development lab. To have a vehicle that can support that makes an awful lot of sense. **Peter Beck:** I think the thing that makes an announcement versus not an announcement—it's an announcement when you give it a name. **Host:** So until we give it a name, it's not an announcement! I think it's important that people know that the vehicle will be capable of this. **Host:** Snack? It's not a capsule, it's a snack! Sorry, Peter. **Peter Beck:** I think we need to find... is there a particle that a neutron can emit or something? **Host:** I don't know. I'm not a particle physicist. **Peter Beck:** It'll be a photon. We already have photons—electrons can be photons. **Host:** I mean, I think when we called it Neutron, we lost all of our rights to maintain a proper atomic schedule, because it shouldn't actually be called a neutron if we're following the order of the universe. ## Neutron Engine Configuration **Thomas:** You touched on redundancy and things like that. Let's discuss the engine cycle—nine engines on the first stage with a single vacuum-optimized engine on the upper stage. Same configuration as Electron, same as a couple other launch vehicles around the world as well. Are you expecting to have at least some level of engine-out capability with Neutron? **Peter Beck:** Absolutely. Look, I want the least number of engines possible. Having a lot of engines for redundancy is great, but you also can make the argument you have a lot more probability of failure because you have more engines in the first place. So it all kind of evens itself out. But the reality is that if you want to have one engine program, there's a huge amount of pluses with that. Not withstanding the fact that you actually get to build a huge amount of heritage on one engine very quickly, whereas if you've got a separate first stage engine and upper stage engine, then it's very difficult to build lots of heritage on that upper stage engine. There's lots of good and bad, but the reality is that we want a one-engine program, especially to get the vehicle to market quickly. It worked super well for us with Electron. You can derive this into a mathematical formula. If you want one engine, you pretty much end up with nine on the bottom and one on the top. It's simply because you get thrust-limited on your upper stage really quickly—you overpower your upper stage way quickly, especially when you've got a light payload that you want to get really far. We certainly hope to do more interplanetary missions with Neutron, as well as with Electron. You just overpower your upper stage super quickly. But one thing that's nice is that when you define the upper stage thrust, it pretty much works out perfectly for a single-engine landing of the first stage. Either way, the first stage has to have a very similar thrust-class engine to the second stage to meet those requirements. Your upper stage engine, generally even with nine-to-one, it's overpowered, so you need a deep throttling capability for your landing engine. Those two engines just look the same apart from obviously a vacuum-optimized nozzle size and expansion code. But basically everything above the nozzle extension has the same requirements. So that's where you end up. **Thomas:** That also helps—we've seen this on other reusable launch vehicles where having nine engines on the first stage also allows you to select the number of engines you need for any particular burn. Obviously using all nine on the way up, but when you're doing boost-back burns or landing burns, your vehicle is so much lighter that firing on nine engines is going to give you all sorts of problems. So you'll be able to select smaller clusters or engines or even a single engine for landing? **Peter Beck:** Exactly. And for those boost-back burns, you can select different engines on each particular mission, so you can spread mission duration time constant around all of those engines. **Host:** Like lighting three of nine or one of nine engines is basically thrust-limiting the entire first stage, right? You just cut down the amount of thrust because you've only lit one of the engines, so all of a sudden one-ninth of the thrust. You get more fine control over it—makes good sense. **Host:** Are you expecting a re-entry burn as well? For return to launch site profile, you've got a boost-back to head back towards the landing site, but would there be another burn to reduce your re-entry velocity, or are you expecting to be able to passively come back down? **Peter Beck:** For return to launch site, we have the boost-back burn, and we don't need to do a re-entry burn to manage the thermals. That's part of the design of the vehicle—the large 8-meter diameter base and high ballistic coefficient, super low mass means we don't actually need to do that re-entry burn. We've proven that with Electron—we know how to maintain good control authority through that regime, and we understand the thermal environment pretty well. That saves a lot of fuel, which is really important. It does put slightly more onus on your ability to get the targeting right, because sometimes during that re-entry burn, you can use that to clean up any dispersions for the landing. So it does put more stress on your ability to get that first targeting burn right. But we have quite a lot of downrange aerodynamic authority with the first stage. We have the canards on the way up but not on the way back. We actually have quite a lot of control authority there for downrange. If you look at the side of the vehicle, you'll see quite long strakes. There's a set of two long strakes and two short ones, and those long strakes are basically the glide body. So we can get quite a bit of cross-range and downrange with that and the canards. You solve one problem, you create others, of course. A rocket is just a giant engineering compromise, and there isn't one optimum solution. But certainly that removes a tremendous amount of energy required and negates the need for a re-entry burn. ## Carbon Composite Manufacturing **Host:** I have a question about building that geometry because it's got that constantly decreasing diameter—it helps you manage your thermal loads. Is that easier to do since you're doing carbon composite wrapping? Is that something enabled by your manufacturing processes? **Peter Beck:** It's funny because in the space industry, this automated tape-laying technology seems new, but in the aircraft industry, it's been used for decades for making ailerons, tail planes, and tail fins. It's super cool—it's a giant CNC machine with an automatic layer head on it, and it just runs in the mold. It meters a minute, and it doesn't care if it's circular or if it's tapered—it makes no difference. It's all about the molds. In the investor day deck, you can probably see some pictures of the molds. That's how you know the program is real. The big difference between building a composite rocket and a metallic rocket is that in order to have the conviction to build a mold, basically the majority of the design has to be done. It's not like a metallic rocket where you can roll some tubes, and if you want to change it, cut this bit out and add a bit in. With a composite rocket, the downside is you have to build the molds up front, but once you have the molds, then you're in production. So for anybody looking to measure our status of where we're at with the program, that's always a good indicator—are we building molds and how far down that road are we? **Host:** Just so I'm clear, these are molds on this slide, right? **Peter Beck:** Right there, yeah. Look at the one above that to get a sense of scale. That dude standing in there—that is a first stage bulkhead that he's in. **Host:** And you take that and it just wraps around and creates something like this based on just going around and around those molds with the carbon composite material? **Peter Beck:** It's basically a head on the end of a robot, and the head comes down and contacts the surface of the mold and basically stripes or paints on the composite, then comes back. Beautiful process. **Host:** It'd be good to see a time-lapse of that, wrapping around and around. It seems like something that would be very satisfying to watch in time-lapse. **Peter Beck:** These are of course just for the Rocket Lab skate park. **Host:** You talked about all the high adventure activities in New Zealand, and that's another industry! ## Reaction Control Systems **Thomas:** You mentioned something about control on the way back down, and I'm wondering what you're thinking with reaction control thrusters. Is that going to be a system that has any sort of commonality either with Archimedes or at least with the methane/oxygen fuel on board? **Peter Beck:** The RCS system is just basically cold gas. The engine cycle has an autogenous cycle, so we have large amounts of gas in store. The RCS is doing a couple of things—obviously helping it kick around and then helping it re-enter. During re-entry, the loads quickly become far, far outweigh and saturate the ability for the RCS to react against, and that's when you kind of switch into that regime between aerodynamic and RCS. We see that with Electron—if you look at Electron's RCS system, they're about the same size as the RCS on the top of the second stage. When you're in space, you have all the authority you need, but once you start getting into that transitional environment, that's when things get a little bit interesting. **Host:** Eventually you get into a point where the air is so thick, so dense, you can use aerodynamic control surfaces to control your trajectory. But you have to transition—you're up in the thin atmosphere where the air is not affecting your fairing, so you can snap it open, snap it closed. Then you start to come back down closer to the ground, the air gets thicker, and you move into using the strakes and the canards on the way down. **Peter Beck:** And it's kind of a bit of a nasty bit in between where your RCS is not that effective because the loads are high, and there's not enough air density for the aerodynamic surfaces to be effective. You end up with large angle of attacks on some of those things, and the forces can build up pretty quickly. So it's clean at either end and sort of a little bit messy in the middle. ## Archimedes Engine Cycle **Thomas:** Let's talk about the engine. You've changed the engine cycle—it's a methane/oxygen rocket, which goes with a lot of next-generation rockets moving to liquid methane and liquid oxygen as propellants. But you have changed the engine cycle, so the way those propellants are all being used is slightly different. Want to tell us a little about why you made that change? **Peter Beck:** The original plan was the gas generator cycle because on the face of it, it is the simplest cycle. But the challenge is that the upper stage engine needs quite deep throttle capability, and so does the landing engine. You can do it—don't get me wrong, you can totally do it—but what we found is that at the end of the day, the limiting factor for a gas generator cycle is turbine temperature. Surface speeds and turbine temperatures are the two things you're always trading against each other. The whole point of this engine is just to be super reliable. We don't want an engine that is stressed in any way—we want to use this engine over and over and over again. We just found ourselves pushing into a corner where to get the simple pumping with single stage and all the rest of it, we were getting into turbine temperatures that were getting pretty uncomfortable for an engine that needs to go and go and go. With a gas generator cycle, you kind of fall off a cliff a little bit with throttling as well. So you end up undersizing your turbine to get the throttle where you want it, and then that just puts you in a worse position where your turbine temperatures and speeds are getting up in the wrong way. So basically we're fighting away with this, and one of the teams said, "Let's just do an ox-rich closed cycle." I was like, "We're trying to build a simple engine, this doesn't work." And they said, "No, no, hear me out." So we went through the analysis. Generally, a closed cycle engine or an oxygen-rich cycle—you're doing that because you want to extract every bit of performance out of the engine. You want really high chamber pressures, ridiculously high ISPs, and really high thrust-to-mass ratios. That's the reason why you go down that path. We went down the path for a totally different reason. We said, "What happens if we don't have those requirements? What happens if instead of an 11,000 PSI chamber pressure, we have a 1,500-2,000 PSI chamber pressure?" What does that do to the cycle? Some interesting things happen. When you take that cycle and remove the requirements for really high chamber pressures and ISPs, you end up with a super robust cycle because the turbine temperatures are just cold—they're just cold—and the surface speeds are just super low. And you get all the nice things about this particular cycle with really good throttle ability. You also have an avenue if you need to—if you have a moment where you can really throttle this thing up and eat into some of those margins. But you have that ability. It's literally like a dragster engine detuned but idling, and it's going to idle forever. It's a more complex cycle in some respects to develop, but we think the actual lifespan of the engine is vastly improved. We're not at temperatures or pressures that require the use of exotic oxygen-specific alloys, so we're not wandering into an area where that gets super tricky. I keep telling everybody we're trying to build the most boring engine possible. For an engine designer, that's probably not a crown you want to wear, but in doing so, we're open to new ways of using old cycles. **Host:** I like that because we hear all the time people saying, "Oh, we've done metallics! Oh, we're pushing the boundaries—so many bars, so many PSIs chamber pressure!" In some cases, you could really try to push the boundaries there, but if you're not trying to push the boundaries, you could just end up with a way more reliable engine. **Peter Beck:** It's what are you optimizing for? We're optimizing for a workhorse, and we're not optimizing for a world record on chamber pressure or ISP. Choose your poison—there's no free lunch in this game. For us, we're really good at making super lightweight composite structures. Given that the composite structure of the vehicle is the vast majority of the mass, if you can make that super light, then you don't need crazy thrust levels and crazy ISPs. We've always got that option open to us to increase performance and increase payload capacity simply by turning a few dials. But at the end of the day, we're optimizing here for an incredibly reliable and robust launch vehicle that just launches over and over and over again—not for any world records on ISP or chamber pressures. **Host:** It seems bad to say, "Oh yeah, it's a boring engine because it just does its job, it runs the way it's supposed to run over and over again." It doesn't break any world records—it may be lifetime world records eventually after you launch it enough—but it's such an interesting balance. You're not trying to get social media likes because your chamber pressure is so high; you just want an engine that's going to be reliable. **Peter Beck:** And look, it's not a slug of an engine either, but it's certainly—if you look at the cycle and our ISPs and what's capable out of that cycle and out of those propellants, we've got a heap of margin. It's kind of like I say to everybody in the team: Do you want to sit on an aircraft, look out the window at that turbine knowing that it's literally on the limit? Of course you don't. You want to look out that window and see that thing knowing that it's going to do 10,000 hours of flight time, and at the end of it, it's still got margin. That's exactly what we're trying to build here—to shift that paradigm a bit. **Thomas:** And that doesn't just go into the reusability aspect where these engines need to be firing over and over again—not just in the number of ignitions but also the amount of time it spends burning. But if you get into a situation where you have this engine-out capability or something along the lines of just a really high demanding mission, you have the option of running the engines into those margins to give you more performance to overcome a shortfall or to meet a demanding mission. **Peter Beck:** Totally, yeah. ## General Questions About the Space Industry **Host:** We've got about 10 minutes left here, and I've been sitting on some of the more generic questions that I wanted to hit a couple of here real quick, Peter, if we could. This one I think is really interesting: Do you think that we'll see a split between vehicle manufacturer and vehicle operator in the future? Like airlines—one company builds their planes, another company flies the planes. Is it always going to be the company building the rockets is also the company operating the rockets? How do you see that shaking out? **Peter Beck:** I couldn't see that being very probable. I mean, I started Rocket Lab as like that naive kid on the panel that said, "Launch is going to become a commodity, and we're going to shoot them off every day and all this kind of stuff." And man, what a lesson to learn. If you write everything down on a piece of paper that has to go right on a launch day, a statistician would say that's improbable. Although you get better and better at it and you put more and more systems in, and it becomes more and more routine, every launch is still a tremendous amount of work. The coupling between operations and launch vehicle—we have a separate operations team that launches the vehicle, but a lot of those guys were actually involved in the development of the vehicle, so they know the systems super well. We still have only about eight or ten people in mission control, but there's a whole team on standby ready to jump in at a moment's notice. So it's an interesting thought, but I think it would be difficult to achieve that. **Host:** That makes sense. There's a lot of expertise in operating the vehicles and making design changes. We're still very much in a developmental phase as humanity as a whole going into space—not quite airline operations. **Peter Beck:** I think the thing that's going to really enable humans to meaningfully leave Earth is propulsion. We're still burning dinosaurs. Until we get away from that, we need a step change in ISP. Because if you look at a rocket today, it's still like between 2-5% of the total rocket's mass is the payload you're lifting to orbit, and you're still 90+ percent fuel. As far as a thermodynamic system or an optimized system goes, that 2-5% of your whole system is actually the work delivered—it's pretty poor efficiency. Imagine if your car was 2% efficient; it wouldn't be a stunning thing. So I think the thing that's really going to be a step change is if we can solve this propulsion/ISP problem where the mass fraction of a rocket is like 20 or 40 percent, and ISPs are in the thousands. I think that's when we really enable stuff. **Host:** Well, let me tell you about our YouTube comments. Every time there's a launch, somebody in the comments is telling us about the anti-gravity technology they've developed if only someone would listen. We get a lot of those. ## Neutron Design Challenges **Host:** What's been the hardest part of Neutron's design so far? Have you come across any "gotchas"? We haven't seen any massive "Oh my gosh, we're completely changing Neutron." Have you come across anything difficult so far? **Peter Beck:** Well, a launch vehicle is just a giant engineering compromise. There's been no real slap in the face, but I suspect they're probably to come. The bits that you don't know are the bits that come and get you. I think back to when we designed Electron and how little we knew. We were doing a whole bunch of new stuff like electric pumps, 3D printed engines, carbon composite vehicles—we were doing a whole bunch of stuff that was all new. With Neutron, we're doing some stuff that's new as well, but the base that we're coming from and the knowledge and the learnings—I wouldn't expect there to be huge shifts because we should know better at this point. But I would say during the very early development of Neutron, that was super fun because we started off at first principles—really at first principles. The first picture of Neutron was a traffic cone. It kind of looked like DCX. Because that is kind of the optimum format—and it wasn't a single stage to orbit, let's just be clear—but that is the optimum format. If you look at Neutron today, it's not quite a traffic cone, but if you squint a little bit, it kind of is. Big base, and let the first stage (which is the reusable part) do the majority of the work getting to orbit as possible. Some of those fundamentals are pretty key. **Host:** It's almost like one of those AI-generated art things where it's like, "Oh, draw me a perfect rocket," and it draws a traffic cone. **Peter Beck:** I reckon that would be the case. If you created a computer program to optimize, you'd end up with the traffic cone. ## Electron's Future Alongside Neutron **Host:** Talking about Neutron and Electron sort of overlap—is Electron going to continue forward? Do you envision a time where Neutron is flying everything and you're not flying Electron anymore? How do you see that working out? **Peter Beck:** Electron will continue as a product. There's a real market niche for it in small dedicated launch that's not going away anytime soon, and nor can it be replaced with a large launch vehicle. We have absolutely no intentions to retire Electron at any point. In fact, Neutron will help Electron, and Electron has already helped Neutron. There's a lot of commonality between things like avionics and software. One of the great things about Electron is that you have no mass margin, so the mass of a pressure transducer really matters, whereas the mass of a pressure transducer on Neutron is irrelevant. But what it did force us to do is come up with really mass-efficient and clever ways of doing things like avionics. So when we look over to Neutron and look at the avionics mass budget when we put that across from Electron, it's just crazy small. So there's a lot of head starts that we get from that. **Host:** Because avionics doesn't really get that much bigger when you put it on a new rocket—computers are the size of computers. **Peter Beck:** It's rocket-size agnostic—it doesn't matter what size. ## Future Neutron Enhancements **Host:** You talked about having a little bit more margin in the engines because you're not turning the knob to 11—you're happy running it at 9 and it's nice and reliable. Could you foresee any future enhancements to Neutron? Like a "Neutron XL" where you stretch the tanks a little bit, or you use that extra margin to carry a little bit more payload? Has anything like that crossed the drawing board? **Peter Beck:** Totally, totally. In fact, the way that Neutron is architected, if there was a need to increase its size, it's a relatively academic process. So there's plenty of scope for that. We don't size a vehicle just by picking a number. One of the advantages of flying Electron so much is we get to work with so many different customers around the world, and that's what has really driven the sizing of Neutron to date. If that evolves a little bit either way, we can totally deal with that. ## Upcoming Photon Missions **Thomas:** We touched on Photon briefly, so I'll just touch on this as my last kind of pre-thought question. You've got two really high-profile Photon missions coming up. We just had Capstone launched a little bit ago, and that mission's going well—it's on its way to the moon. But you've got two more that are going beyond low Earth orbit. You've got a private Venus mission and you've got a mission for NASA going to Mars. Any exciting updates on either of those fronts? **Peter Beck:** The Mars mission is actually two spacecraft. It's a super challenging mission because it's not just putting stuff around Mars—we actually have to put these two spacecraft and maneuver them absolutely opposed to each other, do a whole bunch of measurements, and then bring them back around. It's not just like "go to Mars and hang around in orbit"—there's quite a lot going on there. So the ESCAPADE program is going well, and the team's working super hard to get that ready for NASA in 2024. The Venus mission is a Rocket Lab private mission. It's kind of almost Pete's mission a little bit, and it's a nights and weekends, spare time, use old qual hardware kind of thing. Because it's purely Rocket Lab and philanthropically funded. The science team is Sara Seager and all of the amazing scientists that worked on the phosphine discovery. So we teamed up with them, and the plan is to send a spectrometer there and actually take some samples of the atmosphere. It's a super high-risk, super ambitious mission, but one that we really believe is important. To do so in all the mission priorities, Venus is probably at the very end, but nevertheless, any spare time anybody has to work on that mission, then that's what happens. ## Concluding Remarks **Host:** Well, Thomas, we have gotten all the way until 4:30 here, which tends to happen. We almost always run out of time whenever we have special guests on, but I think we've covered just about all the different topics that we wanted to talk with Peter about today. We talked about the Neutron updates—design not only of the rocket itself but also some of the ground infrastructure and what's going on out there at Wallops. We talked about the Electron launches coming up there at Wallops. We talked a little bit about Photon. I think we covered everything, didn't we? **Thomas:** I think so. I think we're all looking forward to that December launch from Wallops because I think NSF will be a little bit up closer with that one than the traditional Mahia launches. So I think we're all looking forward to that. Peter, thank you so much for hopping on for another episode of NSF Live. It is always an absolute pleasure. **Peter Beck:** Thanks very much guys, it's great to catch up. **Host:** Good deal. So folks, thank you all for watching as well. That is going to bring us to the end of today's NSF Live. Again, massive thanks to Rocket Lab and Peter Beck for spending time on the weekend here, giving us almost two hours of time talking about the cool projects they're working on. Massive thanks to the members as well, the people who make this possible. I'm going to show the screen real quick. It looks like Michael reformatted it so the names fit because it used to be that there were so many people supporting what we do, we couldn't fit all your names on the screen. And now we do, but thanks to the members, especially the Launch Directors and Flight Engineers who make this possible. That is going to bring us to the end of NSF Live today. As always, be looking for us on Sundays with special guests and updates and all sorts of interesting information. It's our weekly talk show where you actually get to see our faces and what we look like. But one more time, Peter, thank you so much for spending time with us today. It is always a pleasure. **Peter Beck:** Thanks guys. **Host:** All right, well we are going to go ahead and shut down. I'm not sure where this is going to end up. I'm sending you to one of the 24/7 streams, but I forgot which one. It's good enough—just wherever you end up, enjoy what you see, and we will see you nerds later. Thanks for watching, y'all.